What do you look for in a Twitter client?

There are loads of Twitter clients out at the moment; some stand alone, some in websites with a slew of extra features. But I wanted to ask what it is you look for in a Twitter client? Why do you use the one you do?

Tell us in the comments, and I’ll chip in with what I look for. I’m planning to take a look at several clients in the near future, and it would be great to know what you’re interested in rather than just what I want to see.

On Mac I’ve just been introduced to Tweetie by @mac_kix_windoze (having used Seesmic, Twhirl, TweetDeck and Lounge). Tweetie is great – it sits in the top menu bar and you can pull it down as and when you need it. Looks nice too.

Prior to Tweetie I’ve tended towards Twhirl as I love that you can set it up to only do an audio notification when a tweet comes in that mentions your username.

One great feature that Lounge was/is going to implement was synchonised reading – the iPhone app and Mac app (http://loungeapp.com/mac/) would sync so that anything you read on one was marked as read in the other. However the company behind it made a BIG mistake by setting a Beta expiry date and then waiting more than a month to launch an update. This turned out to be exactly the same version as before but without an expiry. I imagine they lost most of their userbase with this strategy! Certainly I went off and investigated alternatives and haven’t really gone back. If they do implement that facility, I may try it again though!

I hate having to resort to RTFM to get something to work, I want to go in an be able to use it straight away. If I find some feature that I think is hidden but is mentioned in the manual, so much the better.
Having said that, a good support-base is always important, and community powered support is even better.

Customisation isn’t hugely important in a Twitter client, although you should be able to define what kind of tweets you’re alerted about. Any more customisation is mostly just bells and whistles: nice, but not necessary.

On my iPod, I use Tweetie. I’ve used Twitterific and, of course, the mobile web version but find Tweetie 2 the slickest. On my mobile, I use the mobile web version, I haven’t really found a decent SE compatible client.

On my desktop I use the web interface with @troynt’s greasemonkey script, mainly for the autoload of the next page of tweets that it provides and the autocomplete of usernames as you type, it saves clicks and page loads and is perfect for my needs.

Lots of really good points there, and that’ll be helpful when I look at various clients. The things I look for are:
– Multiple accounts: I want it to be easy to read and post for several accounts at once
– Groups: I follow a lot of people, but there are a few I don’t want to miss anything from, so I want to be able to put them in a group

Those are the main things, and it’s surprising how many clients don’t do them well. Other stuff is nice to have but not absolutely necessary, like syncing between desktop and iPhone, or fancy notifications.